What is Syntactic Analysis?
Syntactic analysis (parsing) determines the grammatical structure of a sentence, mapping words into parts of speech and dependency trees. It’s a core NLP step before deeper semantic analysis.
How It Works (quick)
- POS tagging: Assign part-of-speech labels (noun, verb, adj).
- Parsing: Build constituency trees or dependency graphs.
- Use cases: Disambiguate meaning, extract relationships (subject → action → object).
- Hybrid: Combine syntax + semantics for intent detection.
Why It Matters in E-commerce
- Query understanding: “Shoes for running” → correctly links shoes with purpose running.
- Facet extraction: Identifies attributes (e.g., red dress for summer wedding).
- Review mining: Extracts structured insights from free text.
Best Practices
- Use lightweight POS/dependency parsers for speed.
- Train/adapt on domain-specific queries (short, telegraphic).
- Handle errors gracefully—parsers fail on typos and slang.
- Use parsing as a feature, not a gate—combine with embeddings.
Summary
Syntactic analysis reveals structure in language. For search, it helps parse shopper queries into products and attributes.
